1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) networks and data transmission therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
In SDH data is transferred in information structures known as virtual containers. A virtual container (VC) is an information structure within SDH which consists of an information payload and path overhead (POH). There are two types of VC: low order (LOVC) and high order (HOVC). LOVC's (eg. VC-12, VC-2 and VC-3) are for signals of less than 140 Mb/s and HOVC's (ie. VC-4) are for 140 Mb/s signals.
With the ever increasing demand for higher data rates there is a continuing need to improve the data transfer capability of networks such as those based on SDH. One way of providing higher bandwidth is concatenation.
Concatenation is a method for the transport over SDH networks of a payload of a bandwidth greater than the capacity of the defined information structures. ITU standard G.707 defines concatenation as follows: a procedure whereby a multiplicity of virtual containers is associated one with another with the result that their combined capacity can be used as a single data container across which bit sequence integrity is maintained. Two types of concatenation have been proposed: contiguous and virtual.
Contiguous concatenation is defined in ITU standards such as G.707. Virtual concatenation for VC-2 has also been identified in ITU G.707 but the means for implementing it has not previously been defined and it has therefore not been implemented. Virtual concatenation for VC-4 has been proposed as a concept but no way of implementing has been devised until now. Furthermore, no method of performing conversion between contiguously concatenated signals and virtually concatenated signals has been defined.
Contiguous concatenation uses a concatenation indicator in the pointer associated with each concatenated frame to indicate to the pointer processor in the equipment that the VC's with which the pointers are associated are concatenated. For example, by contiguously concatenating four VC-4's an information structure with a data rate equivalent to a VC-4-4c could be created. The resulting VC-4-4c equivalent signal has only one path overhead (i.e. 9 bytes only). However many installed SDH networks cannot carry out the necessary processing to support contiguous concatenation. In order to implement contiguous concatenation in such SDH networks it would be necessary to modify the hardware of the equipment in order to handle the concatenated signal. Suitable modification of such a network would be prohibitively expensive.
This can cause a problem when the customer wishes to transfer data which requires a bandwidth too high for the installed SDH network to handle, such as some broadband services. For example a customer may wish to transfer data in VC-4-4c format but would be unable to transport it over current SDH networks which do not support concatenation.
The object of the invention is to provide an SDH network with the capability of carrying signals of increased bandwidth. A further object is to provide for the information content of an STM signal carrying data in contiguously concatenated virtual containers to be transmitted over an SDH network not itself capable of carrying contiguously concatenated signals.